One huge advantage of laptops compared to desktops is that you can take them anywhere you please without much hassle. But if the laptop’s battery life is less than satisfactory, then it’s not really much of an advantage. Luckily, you can always improve your laptop battery life.
There’s the usual tip of just enabling the Battery Saver or Power Saver mode to improve the laptop battery life, but there are more ways to conserve that lithium-ion juice.
Some of them are even simpler than setting up the aforementioned operating modes for the laptop. Make sure to follow or make a habit of performing some of these for your device in order to squeeze as much battery duration as possible.
RELATED: 4 Best Laptops for Home Use
Lower the Brightness
One of the most demanding components of the laptop when it comes to electricity is, of course, the monitor or the screen. Brighter screens consume more power. Thus lowering your screen’s brightness will help immensely in conserving the laptop battery life.
This does come with a drawback; visual clarity takes a hit which is especially important when you’re editing digital media, watching movies or playing video games.
However, you don’t have to turn it all the way down until it becomes a dim black mirror reflecting your dark near future back at you; instead, you can tune the brightness level to your taste and according to what you find acceptable.
Consider staying in darker rooms so you don’t have to use as much brightness. This might cause eyestrain, but a good rechargeable monitor light bar should alleviate that.
Disable the Keyboard Backlight
Some or perhaps most of the recent laptop models today include a thoughtful RGB or white backlight to their keyboards; such a feature is always helpful for people who prefer to work in the dark.
However, this same feature also comes at the cost of increased battery power consumption. Some anecdotal reports even claim a 50 percent shorter battery life with the keyboard backlight at full brightness.
So it’s best to disable that backlight to conserve laptop battery life. There are better alternatives to backlighting, such as the aforementioned monitor light bar which will illuminate the keyboard.
Use Earphones or Headphones for Sound
Speakers are also some of the worst offenders when it comes to preserving laptop battery life. If they’re even higher quality, then they’ll likely consume more power. Sadly, you’re going to have to silence those speakers if you want as much battery juice as possible for your laptop.
Instead, you can use earphones or headphones in place of the speakers. Depending on your laptop’s speaker quality, earphones or headphones could be better or worse. But generally, earphones and headphones provide you a clearer hearing for ambient sounds or dialog.
For bass though, you can’t beat speakers. But even if what you do with your laptop involves sound editing or design, headphones are sometimes still the superior and clearer way to hear audio.
Avoid Multitasking When Unnecessary
Do you like opening multiple Chrome tabs and then forgetting them while you play a light game in the background and working on an open Excel Sheet from time to time on top of a running YouTube or Spotify audio loop? You’re going to have to lessen the active activities if you want more battery longevity.
Multitasking on your laptop increases CPU and RAM power consumption, among other components. It just so happens that RAM activity is one of the most taxing on battery life. CPU consumption is not that heavy on the battery, but it just might surprise you if you keep maxing out the cores and the threads (the usage).
For your best bet, learning to do things one at a time and minimizing the multitasking on an unplugged laptop will help a lot with the battery.
Turn on Airplane Mode During Offline Activities
Both the Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth modules on the laptop also consume their fair share of battery juice. Just as phones also drain more of their battery by being on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, the same thing applies to laptops of all kinds.
So for better battery life during offline work or offline games, you might want to just turn on Airplane Mode. You can usually find it on the bottom right of the taskbar, among the Internet Connection and Volume icons.
This will disable all the laptop’s wireless connectivity and modes but if you’re not doing anything that requires the internet or Bluetooth devices, then you’re practically safe. Just disable Airplane Mode again once you need to access the internet or Bluetooth. It’s a seamless transition most of the time.
Use Wireless Peripherals
Wired peripherals such as the keyboard and mouse require some battery power from the laptop in order to run. They even use USB slots which also draw power from the battery. As expected, avoiding these wired devices can save you a bit of power.
They do have wireless alternatives that rely on Bluetooth or 2.4GHz dongles. These wireless devices tend to shut themselves down to conserve their own battery life when they’re not in use; that’s additional power savings for you.
It’s also better– for the mouse, as an example, for these wireless peripherals to run on their own dry cell batteries instead of being rechargeable lithium-ion; that way they don’t have to tap into the laptop’s battery if ever they run out.
Wireless mice that run on dry cell batteries last fairly long anyway (as much as six months).
Disable Turbo Settings
This isn’t applicable to all laptops. Still, most gaming laptops come with a “turbo” or “game” mode feature or button that allows them to use more power in order to gain a performance boost if they’re plugged in.
The problem is, sometimes this mode stays on even if the laptop is unplugged. While laptops operate differently, some turbo or game modes purposely increase lighting or CPU or GPU resource allotment even while unplugged.
So just to be sure, disable turbo or game mode if you’re not doing anything that requires the laptop to be plugged in.
Put an Off Instruction on the Screen
In the Control Panel for Windows, under Hardware and Sound, there’s a tab called Power Options or Power Plan. In this tab, there’s an instruction for your laptop on what to do if you close the lid or cover.
In certain configurations, this is set to “nothing.” But you can change this to instruct the laptop to turn off the screen or even go to Sleep mode if the lid is closed.
As expected, it’s a good way to conserve laptop battery life. Some setups have it on by default which is good.
If you chose Sleep mode when the lid is closed, you can even hit two birds with one stone. The screen is off and the laptop also powers down.
All you have to do is open the lid again to “awaken” the laptop or to turn the screen back on depending on the mode you chose.
You can now enjoy even better laptop battery life. It’s also better to spread the good word by sharing this article. Your friends, relatives, and co-workers would certainly need these tips on conserving laptop battery life.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.